After the news broke that the Slamdance film festival had pulled finalist Danny Ledonne’s Super Columbine

btw, Patrick’s Gamasutra article is up.

Also, this week’s The Escapist is about serious games, and the first article discusses SCMRPG!.

As you know, the NYTimes article quotes andrew and mentions michael. Another of the related material quotes an interview with nick. And I’m just delighted that I’m talking about some buddies in my class, and the class is going unbelievably well to boot, so I’m just very happy about it. So there.

But both threats are alike, in that they oppose practical “necessity” (expedience) to ethical necessity.

Thanks for the “extra happening” — that Baxter character must really f*@#ing hate this game!

Assuming the threat of going to court was the biggest reason for pulling the game, I’d guess Baxter would argue that if the game hadn’t been pulled, it’s not that the festival would have failed this year, but would have potentially permanently gone away for all future years, i.e. bankrupted by legal fees. (I personally find that hard to believe, though.)

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Also, don’t miss this extra happening that occurred at the festival.

I truly appreciate your flexibility and nuance, that questions of integrity, art vs. market, etc. are not absolute, and that finesse and sacrifice are sometimes necessary. On the other hand, integrity requires that one take a stand when the pressure is on, that ethical necessities always trump practical “necessities.”

It’s easy to pretend integrity when the sponsors are happily enjoying the pretense of integrity for their advertising dollar. — Pretending to take a stand can pay very well. But actually taking a stand means doing what is right even when it’s impractical to do so; it means losing big from time to time — and coming back stronger, we would all hope. Indeed, had Slamdance done the right thing here, even if it meant the festival failed this year, they would have enormous loyalty for years to come, a geometrical surge in loyalty, both artistic and corporate: for they would have proven that they *do* have integrity, that in this context there is no such thing as a “practical mistake,” but only an artistic mandate.

By contrast, pre-screening the entries, to prevent another PR fiasco, is just a way of building into the system this year’s failure. It codifies and insures that Slamdance/GGC is not the indie Mecca one would have liked to imagine. Now certainly there’s a place in the world for the “indie but not *too* provocative festival,” but I wouldn’t think to invoke the concept of “integrity” to describe such a creature.

But, soon thereafter we learned Baxter had multiple, unclear reasons for pulling SCMRPG!. In fact today it’s not totally clear to me which reasons were the real ones.

If the intentions of the festival organizers are truly forthright (ie, if the reason for pulling the game was solely due to external corporate sponsor pressure), then I would only blame their flawed procedure for accepting games into the festival, namely that they needed to give more thought to the pressures they might encounter; Baxter needed to be more in the loop, if he wasn’t… Festivals need procedures whereby they can totally commit to games once they’re accepted. (Hindsight is 20/20, of course…)

Breslin, I agree that it’s never acceptable to pull a game, but at the same time, mistakes happen. In an ideal world, it was not a mistake to include SCMRPG!, since I think it deserved to be there, but in practical terms, it was a mistake. Again, if the reasons had been solely external for pulling the game, and they improved their acceptance procedures in the future, I could have gone on supporting Slamdance.

> It would have been unfair to the other finalists to have not pulled it, leading to the festival being cancelled.

[later asking, perhaps only rhetorically]

> would it have been better to have resulted in cancellation of the festival?

I guess there are two questions, one practical and the other theoretico-hypothetical.

The first (practical) question: “Would steadfast and reasoned defense of ‘SCMRPG!’ have led nevertheless to the cancellation of the festival, and (assuming that’s true) was this in fact the basis of the decision to force ‘SCMRPG!’ to withdraw?” I cannot say — not enough information — though I find the arguments of Ian Bogost far more convincing than those of Peter Baxter. A corollary question: “Assuming that it’s unclear whether steadfast and reasoned defense would prevail, (which is normally the case), would it have been ‘worth the risk’ to keep ‘SCMRPG!’?” Again, I don’t have enough information to calculate the risks. But the second question makes this irrelevant.

The second (theoretico-hypothetical) question: “What are the conditions under which it’s acceptable to pull a game, when the existence of the festival itself is on the line?” The answer is, it’s never acceptable. If it’s unfair to the other finalists, that crime is being committed by the people who shut the festival, not by those who might have defended to the end what’s right. That’s what integrity means: one doesn’t have integrity if one is unwilling to make serious sacrifices for it. If the game were immoral in an uninteresting way — which is the only legitimate theoretical excuse for such censorship — then it wouldn’t have been there to begin with.

(We’re told that the writer, co-author of Smartbomb, wanted the piece to be a much longer piece about indie games in general, but it was trimmed down by the editors.)

That’s now the third reason we’ve heard for pulling the game — sponsors complaining, Baxter’s personal moral decision, and now the threat of being sued. Probably all three are true, I’m guessing.

This is also the first I’ve heard that PC World called SCMRPG! the second worst game of all time. cool.

Yeah, this is starting to become big. Of course, this is giving the Slamdance games competition more publicity than they have ever had and some believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity…

I was contacted by a major news outlet to discuss it… I am very surprised to see that it has made it to the mass-market media. This might be a very good thing for us, and also a good thing for Slamdance (I still believe that it is a great outlet for indies and would like to see it succeed).

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Hopefully something will have been accomplished by these protests after all is said and done.